This is a transcript of Episode #546 of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast, hosted by Larry Weidel with guest Heather Smith. The episode covers Heather's upbringing in a family-owned retail business, early entrepreneurial experience (working from age nine), and transition into exhibition design. Heather describes inventing an interactive-video concept—"videos that talk back"—that she conceived around 2010, developed into a proof-of-concept in 2012, and publicly tested in late 2012/early 2013, eliciting strong emotional reactions and skepticism from early audiences. Themes include vision, connecting disparate ideas, leadership, hiring complementary talent, and persevering through doubt.
Questions this video answers
Around 2010.
2012.
Late 2012 / early 2013.
Episode #546.
Larry Weidel.
Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell.
Okay, let me give you, let me find out this. What kind of business experience did you have at 2017 when you're launching this thing? What kind of business experience had you accumulated along life's highway?
So I grew up in a family owned business and I've been working since I was 9 years old for them. And so I've always been an entrepreneur myself. I own my own company. Prior to this it was an exhibition design company. And then when I came up with this concept it was still under the exhibition design company that I ran. But no formal training whatsoever. Nothing. I think most of it all comes from my grandfather. Like you were talking earlier, what I kept thinking, what I kept thinking my grandfather saying to me was know who you are, know what you're not good at, know what your strengths are and find the best people that you could possibly afford to hire to fill in what you're not good at and, and work with you on that and then bring them along on that journey. And I pretty much, I stuck that, you know, it, I've stuck to that my whole life. And it's.
Yeah. And another way of, I've heard that I like about that bringing them along in the journey is have a vision that is big enough to include them. It's not just, you know, I can be successful if I do this. But yeah, that's the thing about a big vision. You know, if you have the big vision, you, you can have something that's really exciting for other high quality people to get involved with because they're like, okay, I can throw, you know, because most people, they know if they're good or not and they know that there's value to their, their work. And so if they decide there's opportunity here, this could really pay off for me that, that allows you to attract them and also, well, it's people.
Yeah, it's building something. It's getting everyone around you to, to understand that you're building and you're doing something that a, has never been done before. So it's exciting for a lot of people to be involved in and figuring out how to do that, how to make it happen, how to be successful.
Yeah, figuring out what nobody's figured out before. And the other thing is again, which causes people to the need are all this, like it's not Just making money, it's making a difference. You know, this is where you can see the thing. You're making a difference. People value it. People, you know, and they let you. You get that positive feedback. And so all of these are ingredients for extraordinary success. Rather than, hey, let's put on a show, you know, it's going to be great. But how can you do something that's, that's lasting? And so what did you do at nine years old when you started? What, what kind of.
My mom. So my mom owned, My parents owned, which they bought from their. My grandfather. It was kind of a. It was a jewelry slash accessory store. It was retail. So.
Right.
I. When I was nine years old, I used to like, fill in the inventory, make sure that the back store room was all organized, you know, fetch. Fetch things for all the salespeople, you know, and, and make. Wrap everything, wrap all the presents for the customers and anything they needed me to do. And as long as I was in the back, she didn't let me go. She didn't let me go out on the floor selling until I was think. I think I was like 12, around 12 or 13. So.
And what did you. How do you think that informed you and your outlook on things as opposed to friends you had or 9 years old and they're just playing and you know, going to school and things like that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna darken this screen for a minute. Someone's gonna come in here and I don't want you to get distracted. I'm here listening. Just keep talking.
That's a good question. I think that I definitely saw the world in a different way and I definitely. I wasn't, I wasn't involved, I don't think in kind of the. More what I thought at the time was my trivial things with regard to growing up and, you know, like high school drama and just things that normal kids do. And I mean, I think that team sports are very important for kids to be involved in, but I had my own team sport. I was working and I think I grew up really fast, actually. I think that was the major, the major takeaway as I was much more mature than a lot of kids my age.
Did your attitudes towards your parents and adults and the real world change, you think in terms of what these people are doing? And there's more behind the scenes here than just mom and dad telling me I can't do this and I can't do that.
I definitely had a lot more respect for adults, especially my, my parents. After I saw you know, what they. How they. All the things they have to deal with on a daily basis, which as a kid you don't get to see normally because you're not working with them. You definitely, you. You learn fast about what the world is and the real questions and the real challenges that happen, you know, on a pretty much daily basis. You also. I learned to deal. I learned about people. Does that make sense? Like. And in a lot of different ways about managing people, leading people, dealing with them.
What about that? What about that you think was.
And then from sales. From a sales perspective.
Right.
It was a whole different group of people that you learned about, you know, and that was very interesting.
And as you came up the ladder, how quick did you get your. A business of your own, you know, moving on, on up?
And, yeah, that was.
In life.
That kind of happened almost by accident. I kept getting asked to do these exhibitions, and so, you know, and I was successful at it, and so kept getting asked to do more.
But what's an. What's an exhibition?
Like a museum exhibition?
Okay. Put on an event, Right.
Yeah, yeah, you could call it that. I guess they were mostly temporary exhibitions for museums that they would set up for like two or three months, you know, and they would have them. And it was during creating one of these exhibitions that I walked away from one of the interviews we were doing. And I said to myself, you know, it's such a shame because my grandchildren, my great grandchildren, are never going to be able to have the same conversations that I was having.
Yeah.
You know, and they were so meaningful, and you could learn so much from these people that I just didn't want, you know, resiliency, hope, you know, tenacity, and just how one lives after such trauma that I could never even imagine. I don't think anybody, any of us, could really imagine. So I just didn't want to lose those conversations. And I was seeing things around me that told me, all right, and this might be something I was particularly also good at is figuring out or connecting the dots. They say. Right. So if you see something happening and you see something else happening, what I was able to do is say, okay, if you can do this, you should be able to do that.
Yeah.
And what if we put these two things together? What could that create? And I think that was a big part of it, was being able to have that vision and being able to envision it already working and how it would work, you know, the ultimate. The ultimate experience.
Yeah. One of the keys of being a high achiever is being able to connect dots that other people can't connect and to kind of be able to visualize. And a lot of that comes because of instinct, a lot of past experience, you know, exposures that you've had. But wherever it comes from, and if you can connect that dot, you say, you know, if you can go over here and do that, boom. You know, obviously Steve Jobs, you know, could. You know, his thing is, you know, I want one button on this thing, you know, that does 400. And so they thought he was crazy, but, you know, they figured it out.
And so I was called insane. I was called insane. I was. People thought I literally was crazy. I. I had one institution when they heard about what we were doing, called it the seance project, okay? People thought I was. I was batshit crazy. I mean, they would say to me, you want to talk to dead people? You know? And I was like, no, not really. I mean, don't forget. Don't forget, this was before. So I came out, came up with this concept that I was trying to get people to buy into in 2010. Skype had come out in 2008, I believe, or maybe it was, but it wasn't really ubiquitous until 2012. And so there was no point of reference for what I wanted to do. And so no one had any. By the time we did it. Like, we did our first proof of concept in 2012, and when we tested it in the public, that was probably early 13, late 2012, people were saying to us, they were coming in and they were having the experience, and they were talking to these individuals, and they would turn around to me and say something like. Or they would say goodbye to the individual. Or they, you know, oh, it's nice talking to you. And. And then they would leave. And these were people that we told before they started that this is a video of a person that we did, you know, and you're going to talk to them. So it's. We call it videos that talk back. But they would leave and they would think, no, that person, they were in another room, right?
Or.
And they would say, oh, I didn't want to ask them this. And I would. I would ask them, why didn't you ask it? And they would say, because I didn't want to hurt his feelings.
Wow.
You know, that he's not really there, you know, And. And they. I had one woman who was actually flirting.
Oh, no. Oh, no.
Hysterical. So it, you know, they now kind of. By 2012, they had some kind of frame of reference, but it wasn't exactly what they thought it was.
So even in Star wars, you know, you could have told them like even the star where the first Star wars with that hologram of O.B. yeah, yeah, yeah. It's. It's kind of like an interactive hologram, you know, and those things have been around, so it's not that voodoo, it's just that nobody's figured it out yet.
Yeah, it was something that was only in science fiction before, but we had just figured out a way to actually do it.
Right. Well, I have actually a science fiction Dick Tracy watch right here in my wrist. So that was science fiction a long time ago too.
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